Kriptonite said:
theklng said:
i'd like to consider myself fairly intelligent.
Yet just too dern lazy to reach all the way over to the shift key, to make your posts look the way that they should.
Like in every book.
Ever.
At least you used punctuation.
grammar has nothing to do with intelligence. grammar is about following standards others have set for you. there are tons of people with good grammar who judge people without grammar because they believe those standards are the highest. if you really think following someone else's orders is the highest, and if you think that grammar is more important than content, then i have no respect for you.
hobo_welf said:
Wait a minute... There you are! How'd you get out the cage? I was wondering where you'd gotten off to.
Silly little trolls.
obviously you have no idea of what a troll is. i suggest you look it up here. since you're new here, i'll even give you a word of advice: don't act like an idiot. comments like that are likely to get you banned.
TriGGeR_HaPPy said:
To theklng...
<spoiler=Why people bother with Grammar>I'll start with the capitalization. While you seem think it isn't needed, it is still one of the most basic, unspoken rules of Forum Etiquette. The reason that people do such a simple task is to show that they have taken the time to read through their post, and have thought that their following post is good enough for the forum.
Typing without going through what you are about to say is fine on IM programs, as you "have" to type fast in those circumstances. But one of the lovely things about posting on a Forum is that you have time to make your post all pretty, etc., etc.
This also adds to your credibility, and make people take your post that much more seriously.
Not bothering with it is basically the same as saying "I don't really care too much about this", and just makes it seem like you are disrespecting the people who you are talking/replying to. Intentional or not, it just comes out that way. Sorry.
fine, then. in a way, you're right - i don't care about
grammar. as stated above, if my grammar really has such a huge effect on you that you feel offended reading my text, feel free to skip reading it. i didn't force you to read it, nor do i force you bring your standards onto me. i'm willing to bet that regardless whether i'd use capital letters, you would already have reached the maximum amount of ease of reading by my structuring of the text.
Knight Templar said:
As did you.
My point was you were telling others they should be better when you are too lazy to press a button. I meant no offence, I was just making a point.
i quoted this post so you'd read the first paragraph in this post. i'm getting tired of repeating myself, so let me make it clear: grammar is not, and will not ever be, as important as CONTENT. if you consider me lazy even after i spent so much time on this topic, then i'm not sure i understand your definition of lazy.
ironically, i did take offense at you jabbing at my grammar and i think your point is invalid (because again, grammar is not more important than content).
let me ask you something; have you ever heard of rhetorics? rhetorics are a tool used by speech writers and people who have to address a large public group in some way, to make their statements sound as correct to the crowd as possible. it's about going in depth with your arguments and make sure that they are interpreted as intended. rhetorics are perhaps the most important point of any conversation; because if you cannot get your point across, you cannot have a proper discussion.
i consider myself a good rhetorician. i know how to write things in a way to make them easier to read or deliver the intended point. i could start judging people for not having the same rhetoric skill as me. i could go around picking at the arguments of any discussion and say how to make them sound better. but that would be flawed.
why? because chances are that people here won't listen; and even if they do, they would still learn them from an institute of education, had they any use for them.
you can replace the word rhetorics with grammar in those two last paragraphs, and the point would be exactly the same. what's even worse, is that you see what content i write, then try to take me down based on my grammar. what motivates you to do this? what makes you think you're justified in doing it? what makes you think someone will actually take your advice for anything than the offensive jab it is?
-------------------
now, for addressing the comments:
Right, well, now that dealing with that is out of the way...
I haven't posted too much on this forum, but I've been a member almost as long as you, and had been reading it for a good 4 months or more before I actually joined the ranks of The Escapist.
i too lurked before joining. i came here around the time ben croshaw was offered the position at the escapist.
I don't really agree that it has changed too much, least of all as bad as you are making it out to be.
And saying that other, smaller forums that are almost built around a specific area is more intellectual than The Escapist is obvious. The Escapist is still a great forum, and much better than most others out there.
two things - we used to have members (people that are now banned) that actually had some nerve to post threads like these. i'm not arguing they shouldn't have been banned in the same way i don't argue when the police arrests a man on an open street. however, those people made it worth being here. the arguments you'd see were better than the pool of fire-and-forget threads we see now, which by that time was also considerably smaller. there is no new influx of these people anymore, which leaves the pool to take over.
the other thing is: while i can't argue with your opinion that the escapist is a great forum, it really just makes me think you've never seen a great forum. the escapist was a good forum, but things have changed.
But the fact that it is open to practically any topic that anyone feels like talking about (e.g. the examples that you gave: "What's you're favourite X", or "What's the most Y thing you've done in the past Z amount of time") is going to bring down this forum's intellectual level. That's a given. So, comparing this forum to any other "specialised" forum... We all know that The Escapist is (chances are) going to "lose", because it's not attracting specialised people from a specific area. It's pointless.
i disagree, even though i developed a theory some time ago about this. the theory stated that any neural network's intelligence is inversely proportional with its size. in layman's terms: any group of people will have less intelligence as the group grows (this goes for computers too).
the proof lies in the communication: the amount of communication needed for informing ALL neurons(persons) in the network(group) will grow as the network gets larger. because of this, the amount of information per unit of speed will decrease. thus, with a larger group, you will get a literally slower output.
example:
a small group of two neurons, A and B communicate. A needs to transfer information to B. the communication is transfered in
n time.
a larger group of 6 neurons, A, B, C, D, E, F communicate. A needs to transfer information to all members of the network. for simplicity's sake, it is assumed that the other neurons do not communicate with each other. if the communication takes
n time for each participant, the communication between A and the rest of the members takes
6n time.
since
n <
6n, the communication will go slower. (insert symbol for complete proof)
the reason for disagreeing with you is that the escapist's relative size, it shouldn't be much worse off than any specialized or smaller forum. the demographic pulls it even further, there should be geeks willing to engage in proper discussion, rather than just offer fire and forget threads.
But for the amount of people who have joined The Escapist, this forum is still doing pretty well for itself. Personally, I believe that those "fire and forget" threads you talked about have a good purpose too.
While I agree that a lot of them can be deleted (no arguments here), they also allow an outlet for any Escapist member to do just as you named. "Fire and forget", so that they can get the pointless responses out of their system. They are an easy way to chuckle at some of the other responses, and have a good ol' laugh with their fellow Escapist members about trivial matters.
the point is that the posts in those threads are so anonymous that nobody checks any of them beyond the first page. nobody is going to read through all of the responses to have a "jolly good ol' laugh with the fellow escapist members". your argument only holds if users actually read the content of the threads. having already said they are fire and forget, most if not all members do not come back to these threads.
I do agree with the idea of a seperate part of the forums for those completely irrelevant threads, but remember that it could get out of hand for the mods to keep people from being idiots about it (as people can end up being...
)
actually, i was thinking of doing it the other way. let people have their zaniness in off topic, but create a separate forum for serious discussion. we could then petition the managers to create it, by having a large enough group of people agreeing on it. judging by the amount of people here who like the idea, we'd have enough to go by.
i'm going to wrap it up now, i'll see about addressing further comments as they come. this took me a good deal over an hour to write - whoever calls me lazy again, i suggest you eat your words.
